Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
22 Customizable Automatic Pottery Wheel Throwing Machine
 Minhao Shi
Mofei Li
Shihan Lin
Zixu Zhu
 design_document1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
 Wee-Liat Ong
## Team Members

- Mofei Li (mofeili2)
- Zixu Zhu (zixuzhu2)
- Shihan Lin (shihan3)
- Minhao Shi (minhaos3)

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## Problem

With the growing demand for customization and personalization, traditional manual operations of pottery production could no longer meet the needs for high efficiency and precision. We hereby propose an idea to automate the wheel throwing step to mold clay in different shapes efficiently, i.e., a customizable automatic pottery wheel throwing machine.

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## Solution Overview

To implement our machine, we will use a pottery wheel rotating at a fast speed and then design a mechanical structure to mold the pottery from bottom to top. The structure needs at least 3 degrees of freedom, two for locating the point on the working line, viz., the radial line at the working height, and the other one for controlling the wall thickness. A viable way is to utilize the lead screws to convert the motors to horizontal and vertical motion, however, for the sake of cost saving and flexibility, we choose the form of a 3R-manipulator and duplicate the terminal arm to shape the inner and outer walls.

Excluding the automatic wheel, we need to handle 4 motors in total. We will implement a program to convert the digital pottery model into a series of target radii at different heights, and further into the configuration of 4 motors in a complete work cycle.

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## Components

### Hardware:
A device mainly divided into two parts, a pottery wheel and a robotic arm, which is a terminal-duplicated variant of the typical 3R-manipulator. There should be 4 motors and a series of sensors for closed-loop control.

The pottery wheel and the manipulator should be integrated, coordinately controlled by the computer. Ideally, there would be a physical prototype, which will realize the ability of shaping the inner and outer walls of the pottery with adjustable precision.

### Software:
A user interface allowing users to modify/customize the shape of the pottery by adjusting various parameters. The prototype software will include a UI that enables users to directly control the parameters of the manipulator, allowing for minor adjustments to the pottery shape based on a default template.

If time permits, more advanced software will be developed, allowing users to directly input the desired shape through a graphical interface to generate the clay body.

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## Criterion for Success

- The machine should be functional, i.e., it manages to mold the pottery into different shapes under the control of software.
- The machine should be stable, i.e., it withstands the torque from the high-speed rotating wheel.
- The machine should be robust, i.e., it conducts the closed-loop control successfully without accumulation of errors.
- The software should be functional, i.e., it manages to map the input shape into sequential motion of the robotic arm.
- The software should be robust, i.e., it rejects invalid input which could deal damage to the machine.
- The software should be user-friendly, i.e., the input that describes the shape should be human-readable.

Dynamic Legged Robot

Featured Project

We plan to create a dynamic robot with one to two legs stabilized in one or two dimensions in order to demonstrate jumping and forward/backward walking. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of inexpensive walking robots and provide the starting point for a novel quadrupedal robot. We will write a hybrid position-force task space controller for each leg. We will use a modified version of the ODrive open source motor controller to control the torque of the joints. The joints will be driven with high torque off-the-shelf brushless DC motors. We will use high precision magnetic encoders such as the AS5048A to read the angles of each joint. The inverse dynamics calculations and system controller will run on a TI F28335 processor.

We feel that this project appropriately brings together knowledge from our previous coursework as well as our extracurricular, research, and professional experiences. It allows each one of us to apply our strengths to an exciting and novel project. We plan to use the legs, software, and simulation that we develop in this class to create a fully functional quadruped in the future and release our work so that others can build off of our project. This project will be very time intensive but we are very passionate about this project and confident that we are up for the challenge.

While dynamically stable quadrupeds exist— Boston Dynamics’ Spot mini, Unitree’s Laikago, Ghost Robotics’ Vision, etc— all of these robots use custom motors and/or proprietary control algorithms which are not conducive to the increase of legged robotics development. With a well documented affordable quadruped platform we believe more engineers will be motivated and able to contribute to development of legged robotics.

More specifics detailed here:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=30338